Planet of the Daleks

Chapter The 79th, which is all purple fur coat but no visibility.

Plot: 
After something happens at the end of their previous adventure - which I don't remember being all that big a deal, but hey-ho - the Doctor collapses into a coma, but not before getting a message off to the Time Lords on how the Daleks are planning to invade the galaxy (aren't they always?). The TARDIS lands, remote-controlled by the aforementioned Gallifreyans, and Jo has to go off on her own to find help. The Doctor wakes up, somehow perfectly fine again, and goes after her. They are on a jungle planet with hostile plant life and invisible natives, and there's a broken down spaceship and some Thals there too. In other words, it's planet 'Terry Nation's Greatest Hits'. After six episodes of getting split up, coming back together again, cat and mouse, escape and recapture, the good guys defeat the Daleks. Terry sneaks in a plague subplot too towards the end, just for good measure. There's no character called Tarrant, but there is a Taron, it's only one consonant sound different.

Context:

Watched with the kids from the DVD over a few days, one or two episodes at a time, with the Better Half joining us for the final two episodes. All loved it, though the eldest (boy of 11) is getting more and more cynical. Throughout episode 1, he was being a clever-clogs about how we wouldn't see a single Dalek until the cliffhanger (and he was right, of course). Then, when Rebec is at the Plain of Stones looking out at the rather basic representation of multiple sets of beastie peepers looking back at her, and asks "What sort of creatures are they?", he replied to the screen "Fairy lights". Lights caused confusion elsewhere also, as nobody watching could understand why the Dalek Supreme had a torch taped to his "nose". They love to scrutinise and pick holes, but the DVD, of course, has episode 3 miraculously colourised (see the Deeper Thoughts section of The Mind of Evil's post for more details on that) and not one person noticed any join there. 

First-time round:
Despite not being a going concern for a huge chunk of the years in question, Doctor Who has nonetheless had an anniversary celebration of some kind broadcast on BBC1 every decade since its inception. The 40th was the most meagre offering, comprising but one documentary; this was more than made up for, however, by the contemporaneous announcement that the show was returning as a full series in 18 months time. The other anniversary falling in the 'wilderness years' after the original run was cancelled was the 30th in 1993. This was accompanied by much more of a circus, with the Beeb celebrating over a six week period with old episodes plus new documentary programmes and short films. This was somewhat surprising given that it was not long since the same Beeb had taken the show off the air, but we fans at the time were not complaining.

The old episodes in question were the six parts of Planet of the Daleks, shown in a Friday night slot on BBC1 weekly, even the one that only existed at the time in black-and-white. I honestly do not know what they were thinking: old Who on primetime TV in a similar slot to where newly made Who had supposedly failed only four years previously? And they didn't care if it was all in colour?! For the first few episodes, I watched in my third-year student house, taping each precious one onto a carefully labelled VHS tape; the latter two or three would have fallen during the Christmas hols, so I'd have been poised at a different record button on a different VCR, but with the same carefully labelled tape and furrowed brow of concentration.

Reaction:

I still wonder why it was Planet of the Daleks chosen for that 30th anniversary BBC1 repeat. They must have wanted something in colour, six episodes long, with Daleks, but there's one other much more obvious contender: Tom Baker's Genesis of the Daleks, the go-to classic era story for a terrestrial TV rerun. Maybe they wanted to do something different - Genesis already had a reputation for over-exposure (though it was still repeated once more before the end of the 1990s), it had been shown on BBC2 recently, and was already out on video, unlike Planet. I'm glad they went this way: Planet is the more underrated of the two, and it was genuinely enjoyable to share weekly with my cynical student mates then, and daily with my cynical family now. Both events ably prove that it is a story immune to cynicism, so wholeheartedly does it go about its business, never once being tempted to wink at its audience.

In many an interview later, Jon Pertwee would report on his distaste for performing with Skaro's own pepperpots, but he manages to hide that here (whereas it's all too sadly obvious in another of their Derby matches, Death to the Daleks) and like the rest of the cast commits absolutely. It doesn't matter that the plot is uniformly linear, or that all the conflict is on a level, only operating in the external / environmental sphere of narrow scrapes with death or capture. There's lip service paid to depth at an interpersonal level - one character doesn't feel so very bally brave when it comes to it, another worries about his girlfriend - but it's only to give a breathing space before the next set piece. And there's absolutely no higher moral or intellectual themes at all. Maybe this was refreshing, as for the majority of stories during Jon Pertwee's incumbency there was an (over-?) reliance on (heavy-handed?) thematic resonance. This isn't the story of colonists and down-trodden masses, nor really of Nazis and resistance, it's just Daleks versus Thals: what you see is what you get.

What's more, it works. I was watching with my brood, who represent the key part of Doctor Who's audience, and they were loving it. They were excited by the right bits, and the younger two (boy of 8, girl of 5) were even a bit scared of some of the jungle stuff. The action is Jules Verne-tastic, with a journey to the centre of the planet, and even a trip in a hot air balloon. Daleks who can become invisible is a fun new idea (although the script forgets about it immediately after the first cliffhanger - a scene later where someone suddenly gets zapped by an invisible Dalek might have been worth adding, surely?), and the ice volcano is similarly good pulpy nonsense. The start of the story is effective too, showcasing the now self-reliant Jo, foreshadowing her going it alone in her final story which followed on after this one.

The production caters well for those who want to pick holes too. Prentis Hancock gets a real hand-cock of a character to play. The jungle is horribly lethal to traverse for an episode or two, and thereafter characters wander back and forth with ease. The Doctor doesn't let anyone disturb the Dalek casing in episode 2, as it would set off an alert, but he and the script have forgotten about this by episode 5, when they open a Dalek casing and it does not set off an alert. The Daleks don't bother to guard their spaceship, and are very remiss in keeping the immunisation machine in the same room as the biological weapon from which it protects them. Also, is it plausible that a race of invisible people could be so comprehensively enslaved as the Spiridons, no matter what the Daleks have done to them? Just throw off your fur coats and run away, fellahs, they can't see you!

Connectivity: 

Both Planet of the Daleks and An Unearthly Child have had episodes repeated on BBC1 (not as common as you'd think). Both feature a longer than normal sequence set in the TARDIS control room in episode 1, and in both stories the Doctor's companions are seen in a hostile outdoor environment where their clothes get a bit mucky. Both stories are also very influenced by the episodic Saturday morning movie serials of the early 20th century.

Deeper Thoughts:
The State of the Nation. Terry Nation, creator of the Daleks, is fairly unique as a Doctor Who writer in that fandom is split over whether he's a genius or a terrible hack. In fact, scratch that, that's how fandom is split over every writer, but with Terry Nation it's more so. He clearly was more industrious than any other Doctor Who writer of the 20th Century, he's the only one I can think of that created multiple other successful series, huge hits like Blake's 7 and Survivors. He wrote every one of the first series of Blake's 7 - thirteen episodes of 50 minutes duration apiece - an achievement of sustained effort then and now. But the tales of his 'this'll-do' attitude are rife too: Doctor Who script editors over the years from The Chase in 1965 to Destiny of the Daleks in 1979 (Nation's last credit on the show) bemoaned their having to pad out and beef up the almost treatments / semi-scripts they'd managed to get out of Terry. In the latter case, that script editor was Douglas Adams; if that self-confessed arch-procrastinator thinks you're not pulling your weight, that's something.

When a script was provided, there was a tendency for it to be - how to put this politely? - the same script that had been delivered many times previously. Nation was in love with a few ideas that he used over and over, both in Who and other works: plants that attack humans, radiation sickness, a countdown to a bomb going off, plague infections, a group of spacemen including one hothead that may or may not be called Tarrant. Barry Letts, when he was outgoing producer of Doctor Who, challenged Nation to do better than this, and the result was Genesis of the Daleks, the best and most original Dalek story for many a year, with some fantastic writing. So much better is it than the preceding stories Nation wrote in the 1970s, that many unkind people have assumed that huge swathes must have been written by someone else, but there's no evidence for this and a lot of evidence against it. The simple explanation is: he could do it if he wanted to, but most of the time it seems he didn't make the effort.

It started that way, really. With no offence meant to him or anyone else, as his own comments as part of the historical record back this up: Terry Nation felt like he was slumming it doing Doctor Who from day one. He was a very successful comedy writer and wouldn't have written for a show that was an unknown quantity, and a kids' teatime thing at that, had he not been between jobs and in need of the money. He likely never imagined that he'd make so much money, but he lucked out, creating something memorable and marketable in the Daleks. This definitely caused some fan resentment, colouring people's judgements of him since, I think. It was luck rather than graft that gifted him his best ever creation, but luck is a part of life, and it wasn't as if he hadn't put in a lot of graft before and since. If the BBC wanted a Dalek story they had to come to him first, and what they wanted was what he delivered: Daleks first and foremost; the plot they featured in was never the primary concern.

The other reason Nation is resented by some is the unfair seeming situation that the designer of the Daleks, who arguably contributed as much or more to their longevity as did the scriptwriter (the description in the screenplay is sketchy at best), was a member of BBC staff and made no money at all from them beyond his salary and an Ex Gratia payment. It's just one of those things that Doctor Who fans argue about, back and forth; as both the gentlemen in question have sadly passed on now, there's not much more to say about it. I could probably spin it off into a discussion about the dangers of public / private financial partnerships, but I'll restrain myself. One thing to note, though: if the Daleks are so successful in and of themselves that the author didn't feel the need to try so hard with the stories featuring them, maybe the strength was always in their look rather than the writing?

In Summary:

Straightforward nuts and bolts (and torch and sticky tape) adventure.

An Unearthly Child

Chapter The 78th, which - seriously - is still compelling, even today.

Plot: 
Two comprehensive school teachers in 1960s London become curious about a pupil based on odd comments she makes in class, and recent bad homework, so they stalk her mercilessly. They find out her address, stake it out, waiting for her to come back one afternoon, then follow her into her home which turns out to be a pan-dimensional craft for traversing the space-time continuum. Disguised as a Police Box. In a junkyard. The schoolkid's Grandad turns out to be a space-wizard and grumpy to boot. Threatened by the possibility of intrusion on his privacy if the teachers tell anyone about him, he starts up the ship, and whisks all four of them off to Earth circa 100,000 BC where they get involved with a tribe of cavemen trying to rediscover the secret of fire. Narrowly avoiding getting their skulls smashed in, they escape again in the ship (named the TARDIS). But it's knackered and the space-wizard (called the Doctor) doesn't know how to steer it properly, so he can't take the teachers home and they all have to go off and have adventures together. The End. The Beginning...

Context:

Some targets are so vast that the problem isn't hitting them, it's whether one's arrows are going to make any impression greater than a pinprick. The blog's random travels have landed it upon the very first story of Doctor Who, a phenomenally successful creation which has continued on from this beginning for more than 50 years giving enjoyment to millions of people across the globe: what is there that I can say about it? "There were leaders before there was fire" and "Fear makes companions of us all" are the Who equivalents of "To be or not to be" or "Is this a dagger I see before me?" - dialogue that's become a quote with its own life, and therefore that takes you out of the surrounding action just a bit. I've watched these four episodes so many times over the years that it's impossible to come to them fresh any longer. For this reason, I wanted to watch alongside at least some of the family, but throughout the half term holiday, no one was particularly interested.

I started watching an episode each evening late, and got halfway before having to start again when suddenly they changed their minds and were interested after all. In the end, we all (me, the Better Half, and the three kids, boys of 11 and 8, girl of 5) watched together; the eldest child wandered off here and there for the middle episodes, but everyone else watched silent and rapt for the duration - the more quiet it is in our house, the better something's going down, so this was a good sign. Another good sign was that everyone wanted to watch the next story the second that episode 4's cliffhanger ending faded from view. Not many comments from the assembled, but the Better Half ventured the opinion that the background hum of the TARDIS would drive her mad in a couple of hours if she had to live there.

The only annoyance with watching on DVD is that the Play All option includes the 'pilot' episode first before the four episodes of the story proper; this was a version of the episode An Unearthly Child recorded earlier, with certain differing script details and production elements, which were then tweaked for the rerecorded version that was eventually broadcast. If one were to actually sit down, hit that button and not touch the remote again, the experience would essentially be to see the same introductory episode run through twice, putting off the caveman episodes by 25 minutes - and who would want that? 

First-time round:
Beyond the odd clip I caught here and there on Swap Shop or before turning over to something else, my first sustained viewing of Doctor Who was when I tuned in partway through The Forest of Fear, episode three of An Unearthly Child. More details of the circumstances of my stumbling across the programme can be read here; it was the 4th November 1981 and this story was the first of a season of archive Doctor Who repeats stripped across weekly evenings on BBC2. Watching this time, I tried to pinpoint the moment I joined the episode; it's been a long time, but my best guess is that it was only a few minutes in, when our heroes are escaping into the eponymous forest, pursued by cave-people. I was intrigued enough to keep watching, and to tune in the following day for The Firemaker, and the following week for a Patrick Troughton story, The Krotons, and then another story, and then another two more. And then I tuned in a few weeks later when the next proper series started broadcast. The rest is history (and science): I was hooked.

I finally got to see the first two and a half episodes in early 1990, when the VHS release of the story was released. That previously un-broadcast 'pilot' version of episode 1 was released on The William Hartnell Years VHS compilation the following year, and a few months after that an alternative edit of it was shown on BBC2 as part of a day of programming dedicated to Lime Grove, the historic but rubbish studios where the story was made. 

Reaction:

For some obvious structural reasons, the first four episodes of Doctor Who are often treated as two separate entities - one part intriguing set up in a school and a junkyard, three parts caveman adventure. Years ago, fan journalism invented a separate overarching title for parts 2-4, "The Tribe of Gum", though that seems to have fallen out of fashion lately. As I'll discuss in more detail later, this is to a certain extent dictated by prejudices of taste. A lot of people don't like the caveman nonsense, and think it detracts from the justly esteemed opener - the caveman idea was done even at the time only because the production team had no other options, and with reservations. But it's not true: although a lot of series bible set-up elements, and ideas from previous drafts by other writers, are incorporated into writer Anthony Coburn's episode 1, all four episodes were commissioned and written by him, and directed by a single person, Waris Hussein. It's intended as one four episode piece. There is a through-flow both in the narrative details - An Unearthly Child subtly establishes that Ian carries no matches, which will be crucial later on - and wider themes.

The tribe is struggling to find the right leader, confused about what the right values are that would dictate the decision. They have previously assumed that it was all to do with the special Orb-given skill, making fire. When it looks like nobody possesses this skill, how and who will they choose? The familiar Za, even though he seems more prone to inaction, or the newcomer, Kal, who's bringing in more food but may also be a liar and an egotist. Mirroring this, the newly formed TARDIS tribe is struggling to find a leader, and a shared set of values. Characters have agency, including all the females (this story has four great roles for women, two regular, two guest cast, and Doctor Who and The Doctor treats them all as reasonably or unreasonably as the males - whenever, if ever, the sexism set in, it wasn't there from the beginning).

What's great is that there's no villains here, everyone is empathetic, but complex. Though efforts are made to display their primitive thinking, the two lead cavemen are still shown to be canny political operators, making the most of the twists and turns to improve their standing. Kal is not necessarily the wrong person to lead, until he murders Old Mother, stepping beyond the moral boundaries (of the audience and the tribe). This is mirrored in the Doctor's musing on similarly killing a defenceless man; Ian stops him before it can be much more than an idea, and thereby saves the Doctor who then steps up and gets to be properly Doctorish for the first time, when he tricks the murderer into revealing the murder weapon and implicating himself. Hartnell is magnetic to watch in that scene, and everywhere else. Watch his very first scene - he walks in midway, and with a few deft gestures, pulls focus and thereafter dominates. The direction is uniformly excellent: only in these early stories does the staging and performance reach this level of reality, the regulars grimy, sweaty, and in genuine panic for their lives and liberty.

I haven't even talked about the first episode's brilliance. It has its flaws (they become obvious after watching it so many times) but they're superficial, and it still is the benchmark of how to do a series opener in 25 minutes. I can't add much more to what's been said and re-said over the years. Even within the space of these few scenes, the characters are shown to have depth: Barbara and Ian both admit to themselves that their motives in checking up on Susan are not 100% pure, and so - like in the best horror stories - the trials that await them are not wholly undeserved, having been brought on by their curiosity. The moment of precognitive doubt as Barbara steps out of the car, wondering what they're getting into, is wonderfully in keeping with this. If you've never watched the pilot version, though, it's worth a go to see how much it was improved in the broadcast version. Every decision made was the right one, creating more mystery about the Doctor and Susan. One thing that rightly remained unchanged between the two versions, though, is the marvellous cliffhanger: the shadow of a caveman falls over the scene of a Police Box standing incongruously in a primitive landscape.

Connectivity: 

An Unearthly Child and Battlefield are both season opening four-part stories (the very first and very last seasons of the original run, as it happens); both contain references to school, history and science (if one counts Ace's bomb-making in Battlefield).

Deeper Thoughts:
It wos not just the Daleks wot wun it. I've read that some foreign countries picking up Doctor Who episodes for broadcast in the 1960s may have skipped the three cavemen episodes altogether. You just about could go from the cliffhanger ending of An Unearthly Child to The Dead Planet, first episode of the following Dalek story, without too much audience head-scratching: our heroes have arrived in another desolate landscape with another someone watching the TARDIS. And, nobody at the time could check the previous episode or pause the current episode to wonder too long why the regulars' clothes were suddenly in need of changing: blink and you'd miss it. For the reasons I set out above and more, though, such a decision would horrify me - whatever one thinks of the caveman story, it's a bit much to go from separating it out to excising it. It doesn't surprise me however. It was after all how the original tie-in novelisation was rewritten. Narratives are powerful things, and a narrative that's popular can be more powerful than one that's true. The overriding creation myth of Doctor Who is that it had an intriguing intro episode that was unfortunately overshadowed by a huge contemporary news item in JFK's assassination aftermath; luckily, along came the Daleks, which turned the show into a hit, and it never looked back... unlike JFK who looked back, and to the left... [sorry, Good Taste Ed.].

There's a lot of truth in this narrative, but it's not the whole story. Doctor Who was performing well for its early episodes, but the Daleks did turn it into a ratings sensation. Arguably, this was even more impressive than it seemed, as that first Dalek story was a rush commission rather than something that had months of thought and planning like the first story. And the Daleks are a great concept, visually and conceptually, for which everyone involved should be justly proud. But the best bad guys are only as good as the heroes who come up against them, and they are defined by those heroes' reactions. This is why the Daleks have never found much of a life without the Doctor. This is the disappointment of reading a comic strip in a Doctorless Dalek annual, and why Dalek author Terry Nation's Dalek-only TV show never found sufficient backing - the heroes were too clean-cut and dull; the Daleks on their own weren't enough, they're only one side of the coin. It was like Moriarty was deprived of Sherlock Holmes and was up against Dan Dare instead (in fact, scratch that - that sounds like it would be awesome!).

The three cavemen episodes set up the regulars, and flesh out their characters. The team then start the Dalek story ready to meet the big bad nemesis and take things up a level. It wasn't planned that way, it was just luck, but it worked. To recap: our heroes are an old man so desperate not to lose his granddaughter he kidnaps two teachers rather than risk her running off if he let's the two of them go, who's willing to kill a defenceless man just so he can escape quicker. Ian isn't a saint either, he's stubborn and aggressive as well as stoic and brave, and needs Barbara to remind him of basic compassion. He likens the cavemen to animals, and has just as many issues projecting his superiority as the Doctor. Barbara can't help but follow her curiosity even when she can feel its going to lead to something terrible. Susan is hyper-intelligent but young and naive. The conflict between the regulars is also very carefully calibrated - not enough to be off-putting, but enough to develop the characters and propel the action.

Step back a moment, forget about the caveman's outfits and speech patterns being a bit risible, and see the quality and depth that's been put into the script. Imagine what the first story of a teatime kids' show could have been like, if they'd underestimated the audience: a bunch of bland people, including one unreliable oldster, adrift in time and space trying to find their way home. It could have ended up like a British Lost in Space. And Lost in Space was shit.

In Summary:

The origin, you might say. And one of the best, all four parts of it. So there.

Battlefield

Chapter The 77th, an Arthurian adventure; well, isn't that wizard?!

Plot: 
A future version of the Doctor finds himself in another dimension and becomes Merlin to a King Arthur who is much closer to the legends written in our reality, but with added zap guns and grenades. The King and his sword Excalibur are sent by that Doctor to our universe in the 8th century in a spacecraft, which is hidden under a lake in England, with a secret concrete tunnel to allow his past self (as played by Sylvester McCoy) to enter 12 centuries later, plus booby traps to make it more challenging for his past self (as played by Sylvester McCoy) to enter 12 centuries later. He was clearly in two minds about his past self (as played by Sylvester McCoy), this once and future Doctor.

Anyway, the sword gives off a signal, which is picked up by the TARDIS, and the 7th Doctor and Ace arrive nearby in the Home Counties of the near-future (relative to Ace's timeline). The signal may also cause a UNIT nuclear missile convoy to break down nearby, or it may just be a coincidence. When the Doctor investigates, a new Brigadier, Winifred Bambera, radios in about this mysterious stranger, and the old Brigadier, Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, is called to the area to help out. So, two Doctors, two Brigadiers, and (probably) two King Arthurs - are we keeping up so far?

Somehow, wicked witch Morgaine travels through a gateway into our dimension; some of her knights (and one of Arthur's knights) also arrive, but they don't come through a gateway, they fly through space and land like rockets crashing into the Earth (possibly because they think it looks cool). Whether they have time travelled as well as crossed dimensions or whether they've just been waiting a long time is not clear (in fact, there's indications in dialogue and staging to point to both, so take your pick). Everyone has a big fight, Morgaine nearly sets off the nuke, but the Doctor talks her out of it, and everyone lives happily ever after. Ish. And I haven't even mentioned The Destroyer, or Doris, or Shou Yuing. It's got a lot of plot, this one, as you can probably tell.

Context:

Watched with the whole family over the course of a weekend from the DVD. There was some internal debate on my part about whether to view the original episodic version as broadcast, or the extended special edition feature-length version on the second disc. I went for the former. For the early episodes a couple of family members drifted in and out, but by the last two episodes, everyone - me, the Better Half, two boys, 11 and 8, and a girl, 5 - watched in enthralled silence. The eldest boy didn't like any hints of kissing or romance bits, wondered why Angela Bruce was saying 'Shame' "instead of the S-word" and was frankly baffled by her wanting to arrest people at the end of episode 1: what would they be charged with exactly? He has a point there.


First-time round:
I first saw this on its debut BBC1 broadcast in Autumn 1989, but can't remember much about it, if I'm honest. I can tell you that I would have been poised with the video recorder, finger hovering over the record button, ready to tape each episode as it went out. I know this, as that's how I prepared to watch all the final four seasons of original series Who, and would have done for many previous seasons had my family possessed a VCR earlier. This was during a brief period when I was not buying Doctor Who Magazine, but we were regularly getting the Radio Times (I remember avidly reading Michael Palin's Around the World in Eighty Days travel diaries in the RT during some weeks of season 26's broadcast). This meant that I hadn't read much in advance about the new season, except for the sheer blaze of mainstream un-publicity that the Beeb put out to accompany the launch (this comprised one short trailer and a half page interview with Sophie Aldred in the John Craven kids' section of the aforementioned listings magazine). Given that since 2005 I have had the internet (and in 1996, a magazine was published in advance of the TV movie detailing its entire plot from start to finish), this would be the last time I watched Who being fully unspoilered. And I don't even remember it. I don't even recall whether or not I knew the Brig was coming back. Oh well; so much for surprises.

Reaction:

It's a somewhat hackneyed view, but nonetheless one I share, that the 1989 season was the best season of Doctor Who for many a year, ironing out the issues of McCoy's previous seasons and presenting strong enjoyable story after strong enjoyable story. The obvious thing happened next - the show got cancelled. But the quality of the output had nothing to do with that decision, I'm convinced. At least it went out (temporarily, as it turned out) on a high. Except... it wasn't quite perfect, was it?  Battlefield was a bit pants. That's the fly in the ointment for any that love season 26 and regret that there was no season 27 the following year. What about the season opener with the ridiculous flying knights and Sophie Aldred overplaying "BOOM!" in unforgiving close-up? Well, this time round, I gave it a chance, watched with an open mind, and - reader - I loved it. Rather than being the clunker I thought it was, it was instead at least an 8 out of 10. Flawed, yes, but almost up to the quality of the other three stories shown that year.

Aside from the risible flying knights, and a couple of moments of 'large' acting which should have been reined in by the director, the only other major drawback, and possibly the key reason it isn't as well thought of as the other stories broadcast in 1989, is the incidental music. This is the only story shown this year with music composed by the much maligned Keff McCulloch. He is the least good of the three regular composers of this period to my mind, and usually the stories he scores are the weaker ones; is that a coincidence or something connected to his music? There's some good cues here, mostly when what's on screen is ominous and brooding, but everything else he tends to smother in tinny synth stabs and drum machine. Ignoring the music applied, though, Battlefield seems weaker when it's doing action or comedy compared to the ominous and brooding moments, so maybe Keff is just reacting to what he sees, and trying to lift the less good material.

 

McCoy has a few dodgy moments, but just as many brilliant ones: his reaction to the nuclear missile convoy's "graveyard stench" is particularly nice. The moment when Ace emerges from the lake, sword aloft, is very confident for a TV series which is supposed to be on its last legs. Angela Bruce is magnificent casting; she doesn't get to do a whole lot now I watch it back, but what she does is perfect; when she wields a sword and gets stuck in promising to do her job with some style, the new Brig has arrived. I'm sure she and the new UNIT would have been back in season 27 had it happened. The old Brig holds his own too; a couple of Nicholas Courtney's finest hurrahs are here; the big confrontation with the Destroyer, of course, but also the wonderful reaction on first hearing that the situation he's being drafted in to help out involves "the Doctor". Even Keff's twiddly synth enhances the magic of the moment. The Destroyer himself is a great creation, lifting the last couple of episodes - possibly he's a metaphor for nuclear destruction, or perhaps just a horned beast with a buff chest.

What comes over most of all when watching is how modern it is: underpinning the action - however cartoonish it gets - are the real emotions of plausible characters. The aside made at one point that whenever the Doctor turns up "All Hell breaks loose" is a refrain that the new series plays often, word for word sometimes. Also picked out are some regular McCoy era themes: a villain frustrated by the ravages of time, the Doctor as game player and arch manipulator (this time of himself), and a three-dimensional female villain brought down by her own grief. But why anyone would want to start this story (and the season, lest we forget) with a scene of two OAPs in a garden centre, baffles the mind. It's not representative or exciting, and it ruins the marvellous gag a few moments later when a UNIT soldier calls for the Brigadier and the person who turns up confounds all expectations. This is even staged as a long shot in a rear view mirror to add to the build up, and it would surely have been intended to come before the reveal of the older Brig in his retirement. I checked the special edition and they even retain it in the same place there too. Why not start off with Excalibur?

Connectivity: 

Both Battlefield and The Day of the Doctor introduce new UNIT personnel, build on the backstory of an incarnation of the Doctor of which we've not previously been aware, and contain the return of a series regular from another era. Both stories contain Jean Marsh interacting with UNIT (there's a picture of just such an event on the companion pin-board in Day of the Doctor), and Sylvester McCoy saying "Across the boundaries that divide one universe from another" - a clip of Battlefield is used as part of the sequence of all the Doctors working together in the 50th anniversary story.

Deeper Thoughts:
Old, New, Borrowed, Who. The producer of Battlefield, John Nathan-Turner, had been in charge for a long time by the time of its broadcast, and had publicly declared he was going to leave, before being persuaded to stay, at least twice by that point. Hanging on to Doctor Who was killing his career, but if he left it would kill the programme. No one in BBC management wanted to hand the show over to any other in-house producer, and not many would have wanted to pick it up anyway. Before casting Sylvester McCoy, Nathan-Turner's production had gone into nuclear meltdown with the script editor leaving, and the star being sacked. So, bringing in Sylv and appointing Andrew Cartmel, the script editor for the remaining three years of Classic Who's lifetime, must have been a relief as well as a breath of fresh air. Rather than sinking down to a combative level as he had done with the previous script editor, he let this younger man run with things. Cartmel got to reshape Doctor Who with a group of like-minded young writers without too much in the way of micro-management from his boss.

Interestingly, the initial attempts to deliver this new angle on the show - those stories that form the 24th season of Doctor Who, McCoy's first run - are popularly thought to have been a misfire. Things only came together (at least according to popular consensus) when Cartmel and his writers started to dig into the show's history - Cartmel's second year marked the 25th anniversary of the show's creation, which prompted some looking back - and they found that some of those archive stories were much more to their taste than the more recent shows before they took over. Battlefield launches the third and final year of Cartmel and McCoy, building on that anniversary season, and producing the best single run of stories in many a year. Again, as I mentioned above, this is all according to the popular view, and your mileage may vary, but - whatever we think of these stories - I think any but the most rabid anti-McCoy fan would agree that they could have been a lot worse. Presumably, it was Nathan-Turner's idea to bring back another archive element in the form of Nicholas Courtney's Brigadier character, and one can imagine the continuity-heavy bore-fest story this might have proved had it happened pre-Cartmel in 1985 or 86.

Why did it work so much better here? I can be a little slow sometimes, and it's only just occurred to me on this watch that writer Ben Aaronovitch's research before he completed the shooting script for Battlefield must have included watching 1971 Doctor Who story The Daemons. It existed (albeit not all in colour) in the archives in 1989, and had a good rep, making it an obvious touchpoint for a writer embarking on the first UNIT story in over a decade, and various elements of Battlefield mirror those in the earlier serial: the action centres on a village pub in which the regulars stay overnight, a helicopter goes up in flames, there's a cute ending scene where the regulars are suddenly seen in a more domestic context; Battlefield's foregrounded hints of the near-future setting (carphones, inflation, 5 pound pieces, the UK having a King) are the equivalent on the fictional channel BBC3, and The Destroyer bears quite a resemblance with Azal, the big bad of The Daemons.

Crucially, though, all this is done subtly, the plot does not rely on these details being known or even noticed, and an effort is made to do something new: the multi-country, multi ethnicity, multi-gender UNIT on show here, which has learnt from its previous skirmishes, is forward looking, and could have returned in this new form regularly had the show continued. Late in the scripting period, Battlefield still climaxed with the death of Lethbridge-Stewart. But a realisation dawned on Aaronovitch, which he's mentioned in quite a few interviews over the years, that it would be the wrong thing to do: Doctor Who can be remade afresh without the need to destroy or even ignore its history.


In Summary:

Despite its reputation, Battlefield is not at all bad. Everything else propaganda.